Cornyn: CBO confirms Obamacare making economy worse

Published 6:34 am, Tuesday, February 4, 2014

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) spoke on the Senate floor today on the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report showing Obamacare will result in two million fewer full-time workers.

Excerpts are below:

“The Congressional Budget Office said the number of full-time workers will go down by two million in the coming years as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

“So in addition to people getting canceled policies or sticker shock and finding out that their health care costs didn’t go down, they went up, or finding that if you like your doctor, you can’t keep them, what we’re finding is that these same people may find themselves out of work as a result of the policies of the Affordable Care Act.

“The Congressional Budget Office looked primarily at how employers would respond to a new penalty for failing to offer insurance to employees that work more than 30 hours. That response would include cutting people’s hours, hiring fewer workers and lowering wages for new jobs.

“The Budget Office does not see unemployment falling below 6% for the rest of President Obama's term. Six percent for the remainder of his term.

“Yet despite all of this, the President still won’t get behind genuine pro-growth reforms, he won’t support genuine reforms of our existing programs like Medicare and Social Security that would actually save them and put them on a fiscally sustainable path. He has no plan for controlling our national debt.

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“So far the Majority Leader and the President have shown zero interest in trying to work with Republicans to solve our nation’s most serious economic challenges which are having a direct impact on the American people.”

Senator Cornyn serves on the Finance and Judiciary Committees. He serves as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee’s Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee. He served previously as Texas Attorney General, Texas Supreme Court Justice, and Bexar County District Judge.